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I'd like to be able to use asteroids as weapons, shields and stealth, for example land on them and cut the power to hide. use them as cover(shielding) from other ships, especially if i'm fighting something bigger than myself. and i'd like to be able to fire at them with specific types of weapons to whirl the smaller asteroids right at my enemy.

This is where the cat is from and yes you should definitely watch that.

rabcor wrote:I'd like to be able to use asteroids as weapons, shields and stealth, for example land on them and cut the power to hide. use them as cover(shielding) from other ships, especially if i'm fighting something bigger than myself. and i'd like to be able to fire at them with specific types of weapons to whirl the smaller asteroids right at my enemy.

The first feature (landing and hiding on asteroids) will definitely be in the game, the second one (moving them) almost definitely not.

X again. Even though asteroids in that game are technically static objects (w/o physics, etc), they can still be "moved". Kind of hacky, but what towing can do is essentially replace the asteroid with a movable "asteroid object" (a ship that looks like an asteroid, basically) spawned with the same X/Y/Z/rot as the actual asteroid, and have that follow a certain distance from the player. Could apply some sort of "energy shield" effect to the "asteroid ship" as a transition, connected by a towing beam to the ship. When towing stops, the "asteroid ship" is destroyed and replaced with the "teleported" actual asteroid. That way, only one movable object has to be considered at one time.

Scorch wrote:I understand why there is no towing of asteroids, but I had a thought: can you push asteroids with your own ship?

Of course, it would have to be a pretty massive ship depending on the size of the asteroid, but that brings another thing to mind: some sort of plowing ship?

Just spit-balling here

The real problem is allowing asteroids to move. This is a technical problem, because the cost of a movable object is muchhhh higher to the engine (the physics engine, to be precise). Asteroids are the most numerous type of object currently, and the only way that we can support a huge number of them is to have them as static geometry, which means they can't move.

If asteroids were movable, then we could allow all of the above, and I would have no problem with implementing towing. But the real problem is allowing an asteroid to move in any way...for now this is a hard restriction on the engine's capabilities

Josh... there is a way to fix this...
As you say:
The real problem is allowing asteroids to move. This is a technical problem, because the cost of a movable object is muchhhh higher to the engine (the physics engine, to be precise). Asteroids are the most numerous type of object currently, and the only way that we can support a huge number of them is to have them as static geometry, which means they can't move.

Asteroids can have rules that turn them from static to dynamic, in my programming background i've done this a lot with objects and made it so that when an object is hit by item [a,b,c] list to check if that item is on the list and then turn them dynamic with the force of impact / angle and such. Also it would be good to include the option for asteroids / objects to be dynamic or not entirely. The code isn't that hard to implement and a global function for such all / none isn't either.

I guess that'd be a great option to have tho so people with high end pc's can make a more breathing universe but ones who haven't can still enjoy the towing of asteroids with less expectation.

Is this technical limit how many can be on screen or how many that can be in a system?

From a player perspective I would be totally okay with say 10 times fewer asteroids in system and perhaps 2-3 times fewer on screen if they would behave dynamically. (disintegrate/alter course when shot/impacted).

Shouldn't it also be possible to scale this so asteroids far away just appear as a rough 2d sprite, closer they are stationary, and only the asteroids near player (weapons range) has to move (be movable)?

Another simplification I would be OK with (or even prefer), is if massive asteroids (including asteroid bases) behave like stationary planets. No weapon except perhaps a thermonuclear bomb or collision with super capital ship would be able to dislodge them visibly anyways. It would also be very annoying to try to land on an asteroid base that's spinning around!